


do not go gently

by TheFlirtMeister



Category: Coco (2017)
Genre: Arguing, Drinking & Talking, F/M, Reconciliation, kind of a fix it fic??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-21 09:50:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17041484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFlirtMeister/pseuds/TheFlirtMeister
Summary: “Hector,” Imelda repeats, “Come home.”“Where is home Imelda?” Hector asks her, his voice quiet. “With you? After so long?”





	do not go gently

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Neotoma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neotoma/gifts).



Three years before he is murdered, Hector dreams that he is drowning in a sea of orange petals. He gasps out for breath, arms above his head, trying to cling onto something to save himself, but soon he is swept up by the current and dragged downwards.

He wakes with a jolt in an unfamiliar bed, heart thumping so quickly that he’s worried that it will leap from his chest.  It takes him a moment before he realises that he is in his home, that his wife is beside him, and he is a living breathing man. He reaches out into Imelda’s warmth, and she protests only a little when Hector presses his cold feet against her.

“Imelda?” Hector asks.

“Mm?” Her voice is thick with sleep, but she edges closer blindly, till their bodies are tangled together. Her stomach is swollen, and Hector presses the flat of his palm against her skin. “Hector, it’s the middle of the night- “

“I love you.” Hector says.

Imelda blinks her eyes open, staring up at him. Her hair is loose around her head, making it look like she is wearing a dark halo. Hector raises his hand from her belly up to her face, stroking her cheek.

She leans into the touch, still confused. “I love you too. Even though you make me Poco loco.”

Normally it would make Hector laugh, but the nightmare has shaken him. He stares down into his wife’s dark eyes, still managing to shine in the murky light.

“Are you okay?” Imelda asks. She is tired from the baby, and from Hector coming home late every night from performing. Hector wants to bundle her up in his arms and soothe all her worries, but he can’t.

“I had a dream.” Hector starts, and then realises how stupid it will sound. He’s not a child anymore, scared of the dark and his own long shadow looming against the orphanage walls. He’s a grown man, with a wife, and a baby on the way. He cannot be scared of orange petals. “It doesn’t matter. Go back to sleep.”

“ _Hector_.” Imelda whines. “You woke me for nothing.”

Still, she buries her head against his chest, sighing. Hector kisses the top of her head, listening to the sound of her soft breathing, before he finally gives in, and succumbs to sleep.

_._

_Ninety Nine years later._

Finally, after a dead boy has returned to the living, and a thief is trapped under the Plaza bell, Hector turns to his wife and sees a stranger.

Imelda is only one year older than Hector, a fact she used to tease him over, but death has changed them both. Imelda’s hair is grey-streaked, her voice deeper, sultry even. She stands slightly crooked next to Hector’s up-and-down body, who is caught forever in a young man’s corpse. He has seen shanty towns and the forgotten dead, and Imelda has seen family and friendship blossom.

“You must be tired,” Imelda says, “Come home.”

She reaches out with a hand, and Hector doesn’t take it. Instead he stares at it, imagining the way she ripped his head from the family portrait and tossed him away. Was it as easy as plucking a petal from a flower, the way she neatly removed him from her and Coco’s life?

“Hector,” Imelda repeats, “Come _home_.”

“Where is home Imelda?” Hector asks her, his voice quiet. “With you? After so long?”

“You are welcome now- “

“Oh, I’m _welcome now_?” Hector says, dragging out the words, “After a hundred years, I’m finally allowed to come home? All because of a _mistake_?”

Imelda’s eyes flash dark. “I did not want you to go on that silly little tour with de la Cruz,” She says, “I wanted you to stay home with your family, but you refused me.”

“I wanted the best for us!”

“And where did that leave you?!” Imelda raises her voice, “Wiped from the face of the earth! No more letters! No money sent to us! Silence!”

“I was murdered!” Hector snaps back, “I was poisoned and died in the street like a street dog, don’t you dare blame me for this!”

They’re facing off against one another, infringing on personal space. Hector has the height difference, but Imelda is fierce, jutting her chin up at him as she glares. They’re both breathing heavily despite the fact that they no longer have lungs - but still their chests rise quickly all the same.

“Did you honestly think I would leave?” Hector asks, the question he’s been wanting to ask for decades. “Did you not understand that I loved you?”

“You went to the city and you didn’t come back.” Imelda says, laying out the facts as neatly as a set of playing cards. “What was I supposed to think? You were married to a poor girl from the country. Anyone would have been better than me.”

“But I loved you.” Hector repeats, because that is his story at the end of the day. He loved Imelda. He loved Coco. He loved music. And it was all taken away from him, as quickly as downing a drink.

Imelda raises and lowers her bony shoulders. “A man can love many things. That doesn’t mean he is loyal to them.”

“You should have searched for me.”

“How?” Imelda asks, but she isn’t angry, more desperate, leaning forward with the force of her words. “How could I have left Coco and travelled to the city to find a boy who could have been anywhere? I thought you didn’t want me. I wasn’t about to make a fool of myself by showing up at one of your performances, begging you to come home like a fishwife.”

Imelda straightens upright. “You broke all our hearts.”

“And you broke mine.” Hector replies, cruel. “Our daughter didn’t even _remember_ me.”

“I didn’t want her to be another child crying over an absent father.” Imelda says. “She was not going to be _us_.”

They are silent. Hector used to wake from nightmares about his parents death, and Imelda would hold him until the fear subsided. The memory of the two of them clinging to each other in bed sends shockwaves through him, that this was how they used to be.

Imelda tucks a grey strand of her behind her ear, a nervous tick that Hector remembers from many moons ago.

“Are you coming with me?” She asks again.

“Not now.” Hector replies, and leaves.

.

_Three months later._

Hector is playing his guitar in his shanty town house when there is a sharp knock at the door. Hector ignores it, thinking that the person will soon go away, plucking at the strings on his guitar to try and remember a familiar tune.

“I know you’re in there.” Imelda’s voice says through the door. “I can hear your terrible playing.”

“My guitar isn’t terrible.” Hector calls back. He isn’t surprised that she’s come. Imelda doesn’t like loose edges.

“We can agree to disagree.” Imelda says. “May I come in?”

“If you must.” Hector says, but makes no move to open the door.

Imelda lets herself inside, looking out of place against the disarray of the shack. Her purple dress clashes with the dust and debris, and she sniffs as she looks around, clearly unsatisfied with Hector’s living conditions.

“Welcome.” Hector says, lifting up the guitar in salute but doesn’t get off the hammock. “I’d offer you something to drink but I don’t think you could handle it.”

Imelda rolls her eyes. “I’m not a teenage girl anymore.”

“Of course not.” Hector says. “You’re not the girl who threw up after her first shot of tequila.”

The corners of Imelda’s mouth twitch upwards. “I can hold my alcohol now.”

Hector doesn’t say anything, but his face must betray his true feelings because Imelda huffs.

“I can!” She insists, and Hector holds up his hands.

“Okay, okay! I’ll find us a bottle.”

He rootles around in the drawer beside him, fingers finally clasping around a brown bottle of something potent. He uncorks it and sniffs the liquid inside. It smells like paint, and he offers Imelda the bottle.

“You don’t have glasses?” Imelda asks.

“No.”

Imelda takes the bottle anyway and sips it. It’s obviously disgusting, but she doesn’t let on, merely handing it back to Hector and leaning against the wall.

“Is this where you’ve been living for all these years?” Imelda asks.

Hector shrugs. “More or less.”

Imelda doesn’t say anything, but studies Hector with her eyes. Hector remembers when he was young and hopelessly in love, desperate to be beside Imelda and listen to her talk. Now they are on opposite sides of the room, silent with each other.

“I thought you’d be too proud to visit me.” Hector says finally.

Imelda makes a noise that is both an offended snort and a laugh. “Maybe I’ve changed with age.”

“No.” Hector swings himself off the hammock. “You’re still Imelda Rivera.”

“And underneath it all, you are still Hector.” Imelda replies, looking him up and down. “Behind that stupid hat and your dresses, you are still my husband.”

“I would have thought you’d divorced me.” Hector says.

“It was too much hassle.” Imelda says.

“You never found somebody else?” Hector pries. He doesn’t know if he actually wants to find out that there was someone else in his marital bed, even if he was dead whilst it was happening.

Imelda gives a sigh, but it’s fond, the kind she used to give her brothers when they were blabbering on about some new invention.

“There was nobody else like you.” She says, and holds out her hand. For a second, Hector thinks she wants to touch him, then realises she is gesturing for the bottle.

Hector hands it to her silently and she takes it from him. Their skeletal fingers brush against one another, and it sends a shiver through Hector. He remembers holding her hand for the first time, the warmth of her skin. The way she had looked up at him, smiling.

“Why did you come?” Hector asks.

“I missed you.” Imelda replies.

“You didn’t visit before.” Hector asks, thinking of how many times he tried to reach out to her.

“I didn’t know the truth then.” Imelda says. “You’re no longer the lying cheating rat I thought you were.”

“Thank you.” Hector says, sarcastic. “Such a way with words.”

“I know, I should have written songs with you.” Imelda says, equally as mocking.

Hector has missed this. Arguing with Imelda, teasing her until she threw up her hands in the air and declared that he was the most annoying man in the world. Kissing her in the middle of sentences just to irritate her, but not enough that she wouldn’t kiss him back.

“What are you thinking about?” Imelda asks.

“Us.” Hector replies.

Imelda takes a drink, setting the bottle on the table. “I loved you, you know.”

“I loved you too.” Hector says, because he will always love her, till his Final Death.

“I could still love you.”

Hector looks up at her, and finds she is staring straight back at him. Her arms are loose by her side, stance slightly apprehensive, and for a second, they are teenagers in the market place, dancing around one another.

“I am… sorry.” Imelda says finally. “For thinking that you had abandoned me. For taking you off the ofrenda. For banishing the music.”

Hector looks at his wife and sees the hurt in her eyes. “Thank you.”

Imelda nods slowly, and then motions towards Hector’s guitar which is still lying on the hammock. “You should sing for me.”

“I could.” Hector says, and then smiles at her. “Or we could sing together?”

Imelda exhales a deep breath. “I’d like that.”

Hector offers out his hand to her, and Imelda takes it, fingers wrapped around each other.

“How do you like Un Poco Loco- “He starts and Imelda squeezes his hand tight.

“No.” She says firmly, and Hector laughs.

“It was worth a shot.” He says, “The World Es Mi Familia?”

“I like that one.” Imelda says, and Hector sits up onto the hammock, placing his guitar on his lap.

“I know you do.” He replies and begins to play.

Imelda is an old woman, and Hector is a young man. He wears dresses and she makes shoes. They’re not together like they used to be, but soon, very soon, they will be.

_Fin._

**Author's Note:**

> Please comment if you enjoyed!


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